


You Give Love A Bad Name

by vogonssuck



Category: IT (2017), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Internalized Homophobia
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-12-28
Updated: 2017-12-28
Packaged: 2019-02-22 23:40:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,588
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13177668
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vogonssuck/pseuds/vogonssuck
Summary: Eddie has known Bill Denbrough since forever. As time passes, Eddie starts to feel like he's falling for Bill. Sonia, his mother, would have him think that that's wrong – but Eddie has to make this decision for himself.This story will be told in four chapters.





	You Give Love A Bad Name

“Eddie, stop that.”

 

Six-year-old Eddie Kaspbrak, seated in a rigid oak pew, stopped swinging his legs and looked up at his mother. He couldn’t help it – his feet didn’t touch the ground and church was boring. Besides that, the tag of his shirt was itching his side and he hated the feeling of his hair plastered down with gel. “Mama, when can we go home?”

 

“After services are over,” she hissed. She shifted to look forward, pursing her lips pointedly as she did so. Eddie mirrored her with as much resolve as his tiny body could muster. The pastor’s sermon, however, disinterested him with extreme prejudice, and his eyes began to wander again. He looked here and there before settling on something of interest: there was a little boy about his age sitting across the aisle, thumbing through a dog-eared hymnal. He swung his legs and tapped his fingers on the spine of the book.

 

Eddie gulped. He wanted to reach out to the boy, to ask _won’t your mama give you a whupping if she notices you’re not paying attention?_ and when he saw the auburn-haired woman sitting next to the boy reach down to touch him, Eddie’s heart skipped a beat. But she simply rested her hand on the boy’s shoulder and smiled at him fondly before turning back to the pastor.

 

The boy looked back down at the hymnal briefly, but he must have felt Eddie’s gaze boring holes in his side – he turned to look across the aisle, and their eyes met. The other boy smiled a big, front-toothless grin and raised his hand in greeting. His hair matched his mother’s, and he had a spray of freckles across the middle of his face. Eddie smiled back and motioned to wave. “ _My name’s Eddie, what’s yours?”_ he mouthed.

 

“ _Billy Denbrough,_ ” he whispered back, breath whistling through the space his front teeth had recently vacated. Eddie stifled a giggle.

 

“ _Eddie.”_ Sonia Kaspbrak did not look down at him as she said this. Her jaw was set, face red and splotchy. Eddie knew he was in for it when they got home.

 

When services ended, she clutched Eddie’s wrist and pulled him towards the door. As he took unsteady leaping bounds to keep up with Sonia’s bustle, he managed to look back. The boy from across the aisle was waving again, his smile tinged with confusion and concern.

 

\---

 

The following day, the two Kaspbraks sat at their kitchen table. Eddie toyed with a hole in the flowered plastic tablecloth as his mother prepared to take their dishes to the sink. “Mama, do you know Billy Denbrough’s mom?” he asked her thoughtfully.

 

Sonia Kaspbrak did not answer. Eddie tried again.

 

“Do you know his dad?”

 

Eddie figured that all the adults in town, maybe in the whole world, knew each other. He wasn’t sure how one found the time to meet _everyone_ , but that, he thought, was one of the mysteries of adulthood.

 

“Can I go play with Billy?”

 

Sonia set down the dish she was drying and looked at Eddie. She wore a peculiarly pinched expression, and paused for a moment before responding. “Eddie, I don’t know Billy Denbrough or his parents, and if it’s the very same I don’t care to. You don’t need to spend time with a little boy who horses around in church.” Eddie’s face fell.

 

“And besides, you know how delicate you are.” Eddie couldn’t help but think she mocked him in her concern. _She wants to keep you for herself_ , a voice nagged from the back of his head. _She knows you’re not delicate but she wants to make you that way. It scares her that you’re not._

 

“And,” she added, throwing her towel over her shoulder, “imagine if he were the type to roughhouse.”

 

She held the word at an arm’s length. _Roughhousing_ was bad for delicate boys like Eddie, _roughhousing_ meant bloody noses and scrapes and asthma attacks. It was running and tumbling and playfighting, using sticks for swords and rocks for cannonballs. Eddie liked the sounds of roughhousing.

 

\---

 

Billy Denbrough _was_ the type to roughhouse.

 

Eddie Kaspbrak had been walking out of the library, stack of his mom’s books in hand, when someone grabbed his shoulders and whirled him around. The arms spun him so fast he didn’t have time to think, and he barely had the presence of mind to grapple for the books when they were wrenched away by a different set of arms.

 

And then Bill Denbrough slammed him to the ground. Bill had grown considerably in the six years since they met at Derry Presbyterian. His front teeth had grown in to reveal a winning smile – one that, paired with a stuttered “puh-please?”, got him almost anything he wanted. His shaggy auburn hair flopped in front of one eye as he looked down at Eddie, holding one of Eddie’s small wrists in each hand.

 

Eddie wrenched his right arm out of Bill’s grasp and slapped his hands away, his chest rising and falling rapidly. “Dammit Bill! I wasn’t ready!”

 

“CONSTANT VIGILANCE!” shouted Stan Uris, who stood off to the side holding Eddie’s mom’s books. Eddie gave him a bewildered glance and Stan began to laugh.

 

“You!” Eddie said in mock condemnation. “You’re an _accomplice_!” Stan laughed harder.

 

Bill clapped his hands to the ground over Eddie’s shoulders and looked down at him, right in the eyes. “We’re going down to the buh-Barrens. Wanna come?” he asked.

 

Eddie bit his lip. He lifted his wrist to look at his watch, which read 3:45PM. “Well...sure, but I can only stay a little while. If I’m not home by 5PM, Mom will raise hell.”

 

Bill nodded solemnly as he rocked himself up into a standing position. “We don’t want her tr-trying to file a missing p-puh-persons report again.”

 

Eddie scoffed. “God forbid,” he said, “now help me up.” He proffered his hand to Bill, who took it. As Bill did so, Eddie grinned at him mischievously. Before Bill even realized his mistake Eddie had yanked him to the ground. Then the two were tumbling, one after the other, down the grassy hill in front of the Derry Public Library.

 

When the world had righted itself again, Eddie stood and brushed bits of grass off his shorts. Stan, who had walked down the hill during Bill and Eddie’s tussle, handed the books back to him. As Eddie turned to see how Bill was getting along, Stan gasped.

 

“The back of your shirt is _filthy_.”

 

Eddie blanched. “Oh shit, how bad is it?”

 

“Grass stains all over your shoulders. Dirt, too.”

 

“Shit. Mom’s gonna kill me.”

 

Bill, who had brushed himself off, motioned to the other two. “We’ll fuh-figure somethuh-thing out on the wuh-way to the Barrens,” he said. He walked over to the tree where he’d unceremoniously deposited Silver, his dilapidated bike. At some point in the distant past, the name might have been apt, but as it was the top tube was riddled with rusty lesions. What Silver lacked in class she made up for in sheer power, though, so Bill was halfway down Main St. before Stan had even managed to disengage his kickstand.

 

The three raced down the street towards the Barrens, Eddie wobbling in his attempt to steer while carrying his mother’s stack of library books under his left arm. _If she could see me now,_ he thought. _Riding to beat the devil and steering with only one hand._ The boys were approaching Up-Mile Hill, a steep street that was home to Derry’s modest shopping district. As they approached the street’s summit, Eddie redoubled his grasp on the books and his bike’s right handlebar.

 

He picked up speed rapidly. By the time the boys passed Keane’s Pharmacy, Eddie was flying. He lost himself in the wind whipping around his face, and very nearly failed to notice the parked car to his left. He swerved at the last moment to avoid clipping his hip, and then again to avoid overbalancing and falling over. _See, mom? I can go fast just fine._

 

Before too long, Stan, Bill, and Eddie reached the Barrens. There the Kenduskeag bubbled over current-smoothed rocks and made its rippling way to the Penobscot. Along the banks of the river lay a dense growth of trees and shrubs, and so the area made a fittingly secluded hideaway for the three. Stan inspected the ground cover – orange, brown, damp and half-rotted fallen leaves and pine needles – before dusting off a gray rock and sitting down on it. He fished a dog-eared book out of his back pocket and flipped the pages a bit before settling in to read about scarlet tanagers.

 

“Hey eh-Eddie, catch!” Bill yelled. Eddie, who had been scouting the river’s edge for crawfish, turned just in time to see Bill pitch a baseball his way. His reflexes were quick and he managed to catch the ball, though he nearly unbalanced and stepped back into the river.

 

“A little more warning next time, Big Bill!” Eddie called back as he caught himself. If it were directed at anyone else, his admonition might have been tinged with annoyance. He’d really let them have it for almost making him fall, he’d let them know just how he felt about submerging any part of himself in a river teeming with muck and microbes. But something about Bill’s earnest smile precluded any anger on Eddie’s part, and he found himself grinning as he lobbed it back.

 

And so Bill and Eddie passed the time, tossing the baseball back and forth. Occasionally Eddie faked a pitch, making Bill scramble, and Bill retaliated with a curveball. Eddie liked the way Bill’s tongue poked out of the corner of his mouth as he screwed up his face in concentration, and the deliberate way that he angled his elbows. The afternoon sun settled warmly on the Barrens, and Eddie might have lost himself in his surroundings and in the way the light glinted off Bill’s hair had Stan not said something.

 

“Eddie, did you say you had to be back by five?” he queried, not lifting his eyes from his book.

 

Eddie froze for a moment, mid-pitch, and lowered his arm. “Yeah, why? What time is it?” he asked suspiciously.

 

“4:53.”

 

“Oh, shit. I gotta go,” Eddie yelped, scrambling for the stack of library books. He haphazardly scooped them into his arms and ran toward the base of the steep incline up to the main road, where he’d dropped his bike.

 

“Wuh-way-wait! Your shirt!” Bill yelled.

 

Eddie turned to him, now a bit frantic. “I don’t know what we can do about that now! Oh man, am I in for it...”

 

Eddie truly didn’t know what would be worse. Bill hadn’t been exaggerating about Sonia filing a missing person’s report; she had well and truly been on the phone with the Derry Police Department when he’d returned, fifteen minutes after the time she’d laid out, and he reckoned she really would have had the officer on call not laughed her off the line. He could envision her now, red in the face and absolutely frenzied, phonebook in hand to call the Denbroughs, the Toziers, Mr. Keane, asking after him. After he’d been absolutely smothered in a bone-crushing hug, she’d hold him at arm’s length and tell him how worried she’d been that he’d _died in a ditch_ or _been sold into trafficking_ or _had an asthma attack, Eddie-bear, you know how bad your asthma can get._

 

But all the same he knew that if he arrived home on time, polo streaked with grass and mud, he’d get an earful. Maybe the old _spine fractures can be insidious, dear, let’s get you to Derry Home for a check-up_ or _dust and grass will irritate your lungs, do you_ want _to give yourself an attack?_ But what he dreaded more was what she’d say about his friends.

 

Sonia hated all of Eddie’s friends, not for any failings of their own other than being just plain old _kids_. In her eyes, they were there to corrupt and injure her son, and for that she held held them in contempt. She didn’t care that Richie made straight A’s in school, or that Mike did all his chores without any backtalk at all, or that Bill would practically give you the shirt off his back –

 

which he was currently doing. He slid his red-checkered flannel over his head in one fluid motion and threw it to Eddie. “Give me y-yours, I’ll t-take it home and my m-muh-mom will wash it!”

 

“4:55,” Stan announced, now looking up from his book.

 

Eddie practically tore his polo off and sent it flying towards Bill. He slid on the flannel – he didn’t need to unbutton it, as Bill was quite a bit larger than him – and, raising his hand in a quick salute, bounded to his bike.

 

\---

 

Eddie was certain he’d never pedaled that quickly or with that much resolve, _ever._ But he made it home at 5:00 on the dot, and that’s what mattered. He took a moment to catch his breath before turning the knob and stepping inside.

 

Sonia Kaspbrak sat in her easy chair, crocheted blanket on her lap, watching midday game shows on television. The curtains were drawn, light low and air hazy with dust as usual. She pushed her bifocals up on her nose and squinted at Eddie as he crossed the threshold. Head down, he stepped around the corner to place the armful of books on the coffee table in front of Sonia’s chair. Mission accomplished. He started towards the kitchen.

 

“Eddie.”

 

Damn it. He paused and turned to face his mother. She scanned him head to toe, eyes eventually settling on Bill’s red and black-checkered flannel.

 

“Whose shirt is that?” she asked coolly.

 

Eddie had followed Bill’s lead on the shirt swap. Bill seemed to have had some sort of plan, some idea of how Eddie could explain leaving the house in one shirt and returning with another, but he hadn’t deigned to share that plan with Eddie. _Great._

 

“Uh,” he stammered, “I was, um, cold? So Bill lent it to me?” Conceding that he’d been hanging out with Bill and Stan seemed the lesser of two evils (the other being, of course, explaining that he’d been _roughhousing_ ).

 

“Oh,” she replied faintly. “The Denbrough boy.” She looked as though she was turning the idea over in her head. “You spend too much time with him.”

 

“I spend time with all my friends, Mom,” Eddie said flatly. At the same time, he was confused. There was an undercurrent of suggestion to her response, making it somehow different from her past reproaches, and he couldn’t quite intuit how. Just last week, she’d cautioned him against spending time at the arcade with “that Richie Tozier”, launching into a tirade about _how many people have touched those machines_ and circling around to her old stand-by, _doesn’t he cut up in school, see, he’s a bad influence on you._ And before that, she’d torn into him for spending the day at the Hanlons’ farm – unsanitary, out on the outskirts of town, _imagine what people will think._

 

“Why don’t you like Bill, Mommy?”

 

Sonia looked taken aback. “Of course I do – well, I can’t....Eddie.”

 

Eddie raised his brows, daring her to answer.

 

“Go take that off. You have no clue what kind of detergent the Denbroughs use, and with your sensitive skin it’s a wonder you haven’t already started getting hives.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to @cathect for editing for me (grammar queen!). This fic was born of a request from @queenjameskirk.
> 
> Come see me on Tumblr @galactiglitter!


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